As part of “green” initiatives to reduce pluggable module power consumption, it may be desired to consider module power saving opportunities in all modes of module operations. Reducing the average use of power during module normal operation is key. It is also important to address the power savings in other modes or a link-down state where there is no traffic to be transmitted or received between the link partners. During link-down state, most of the power hungry components may be turned off.
However, the optical module must have the ability to wake up its link partner instantaneously when there is data to be transmitted or received. As such, it may be desirable to provide a Wake-on-LAN feature used in a computing device between the optical partners or link partners. It may also be desire for such a feature to co-exist with legacy optical modules. As such, the Wake-on-LAN feature may need to be transparent and fully inter-operable with legacy modules while avoiding performance degradations. In other words, there is a need for a system with a side-band handshaking protocol and channel that is independent from the normal data traffic path.